Former Los Angeles Lakers superstar Kobe Bryant had a brilliant career and one of the coolest nicknames in sports history: the Black Mamba. Interestingly, that name was initially created for Chicago Bulls’ legend Michael Jordan, who decided to pass on it.
Michael Jordan Passed on Being the Black Mamba, Making Way for Kobe Bryant
Back in 2022, Nike decided their newest shoe would look kind of like a snake after using black and tubelike tech flex to create it.
Gentry Humphrey, a Nike executive, was the first to come to the snake realization and decided to search for ‘the most bad*** black snake there is’ and found the black mamba. Due to its speed, agility, and ability to strike fear into its prey, Nike went with.
The sportswear giant decided to launch a campaign for the man on whom its company was at least partially built in Jordan. Shoe samples were created for Jordan, who provided input on the design, and his vision ‘led the way.’
Nike was then tasked with selling Jordan on the plan, but Jordan did not seem keen on it. “You could just tell from the very beginning,” Humphrey said via Baxter Holmes of ESPN, “he was uncomfortable.”
It wasn’t because Jordan disliked the shoes or anything like that. In fact, Larry Miller, the president of Jordan Brand, called Jackie Thomas, who became Jordan Brand’s new director of marketing in 2023, to let her know to come to the office after she met with Jordan.
Miller was very pleased with Thomas’ ideas, but had a major issue.
“Hey, good job in there yesterday,” Miller said. “MJ really liked the meeting. The product looked great, but you’ve got a problem.
“MJ doesn’t like snakes.”
Jordan’s fear was known to those close to him.
“He was terrified,” author Mark Vancil, who worked with Jordan on the book Rare Air, said, “If you watched TV with him and a snake came on, he’d change the channel. And [Jordan] goes, ‘If you write that, somebody’s going to get killed because somebody’s going to throw a snake one day.”
Kobe Bryant Becomes the Black Mamba
Although both Jordan and Bryant are known to have similar attitudes on the court, their mentality isn’t exactly the same.
After seeing the film Kill Bill, which features the black mamba, Bryant decided that name was perfect for him.
“The length, the snake, the bite, the strike, the temperament,” he told the Post, “‘Let me look this s— up.'”
“I looked it up — yeah, that’s me. That’s me!'”
That led Bryant to join Nike once his contract with Adidas was up, creating a very impressive new Nike line of sneakers and one of the coolest nicknames of all time.
“I hear everything that the crowd is saying. I hear it. So it’s like this place that was my refuge is now being bombarded with all kinds of things that they would say. I had to separate myself because, going through that time, it felt like there were so many things coming at once, and it was just becoming very, very confusing. I had to organize things.
“So, I created the black mamba.”
Bryant embraced the name (and the shoe), and the rest is history.
